


Cut Loose

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe, Domestic Violence, Gen, Paranormal, mention of miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 10:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12318771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: “I didn’t do anything,” Frances tells him, but all of Harlan knows that’s not true. “It ain’t – it’s all in how you ask,” she finally says, running her fingertips gently through Raylan’s hair. “If you ask nicely, if you want something badly enough, then sometimes the earth hears. Sometimes wishes come true.”Raylan isn’t stupid. He’s read the entire children’s section twice over, knows his fairytales. He knows that wishes don’t ever come free.





	Cut Loose

Folks said Raylan learned dark magic at his daddy’s knee. Folks didn’t know it was Frances, who’d been born with hill magic in her blood. Arlo just tried to beat the secrets free.

Folks said Bo’s woman had gone to Arlo, when she couldn’t conceive. And it was no wonder, they said, shook their heads and unrolled their cigarettes to pinch that last bit of tobacco into a fresh paper. It was no wonder she couldn’t conceive, taken to bed by a Crowder man, when everyone knew the Crowders had traded the last of their line for more ammunition years before. When everyone knew that God had promised to smite His enemies unto the third and fourth generation — and no one could possibly hate God more than the Crowders did.

The Randolphs, sitting on the porch watching their neighbors as the sun set, half an eye out for gossip and half an eye for sin, said Hannie Crowder left the Givens’s later that day, already swollen with child, darkness seeded and flourishing on her promises, on her blood.

They said the child was built out of brimstone and grave dirt. Said it was the corpse of some other child planted in her womb, maybe the half-formed baby Arlo had knocked out of Frances the week before. (Folks said Arlo had taken the real little boy, the one Boyd Crowder could have been, and buried him in Raylan’s grave. That he bought the tombstone years later, to mark the spot.)

There ain’t no reason to believe anything folks say in Harlan County, though. No reason to believe that Boyd Crowder is anything but Bo’s eldest son, though he doesn’t take after his father — Bo’s hair going gray, barely noticeable from the dirty dishwater brown it had been, built like the defensive linebacker he’d played — or his mother, tall and raw boned with fine hair the color of uncut hay and delicate china pattern blue eyes. (It’s no wonder that Bowman is Bo’s favorite — round and chubby and pink, his father’s lank hair and a child’s uncomprehending blue eyes; so very different from Boyd, with his narrow face and coal black hair, pale winter soil eyes that have seen empires fall.)

There’s no reason to believe it, but all the other kids do. They swear they saw Boyd fall off the monkey bars in first grade, twist his head so far around that he was looking over his own shoulder blades, then grin and pop it back into place like nothing was wrong. Raylan doesn’t think that’s true. (He’s seen Boyd fall. He’s seen Boyd skin his palms and knees toppling off the school roof after a dare, all the other kids too slow to make it around the building to where Boyd’s landed. He’s seen the dark, pitch streaks of Boyd’s blood, seen him press his scraped hands to Harlan soil and pull them away clean, nothing but streaks of soot ground deep into the lifeline on his palms. Raylan’s seen enough to know it couldn’t have happened like the other kids say, knows how it looks when Boyd Crowder reveals the ash and slurry beneath his skin.)

Nobody says anything directly — nobody ever does in Harlan, never say nothing to Raylan’s bruised face when he walks down Main St., just whisper around his coming, voices rolling past him like a wave — at least, not to Boyd. Not to Bowman neither, because there ain’t much that can be said for Bo’s second son, besides that he’s unquestionably _Bo Crowder’s boy_ , but Bowman packs a mean right hook even at seven, and he ain’t gonna hear a word said against Boyd ‘less he’s the one saying it.

Raylan asks Frances, once. He’s still panting when he gets home, ran as soon as he saw the coal dust on Boyd’s pink, healed hands, ran all the way home like the Hunt was nipping at his heels. “What did you do?” he wonders. What had she done to Hannie Crowder, what horrible talent bubbled in his mama’s blood, that she could have created Boyd?

Frances doesn’t ask what Raylan means. She doesn’t have to — it was her hands on Hannie, Raylan’s dead sibling that went into Hannie’s womb or maybe Hannie’s real baby buried in Raylan’s grave, or maybe neither thing is true and Raylan is still tied to Boyd at the root, Boyd is mistletoe set poisonous and parasitic into Raylan’s bones, impossible to cut loose and escape.

She brushes Raylan’s sweat-drenched hair off his forehead; her fingers cool and damp, pruned from washing pots and pans, don’t feel dangerous or magical at all. “I didn’t do anything,” she tells him, but all of Harlan knows that’s not true. “It ain’t – it’s all in how you ask,” she finally says, running her fingertips gently through Raylan’s hair. “If you ask nicely, if you want something badly enough, then sometimes the earth hears. Sometimes wishes come true.”

Raylan isn’t stupid. He’s read the entire children’s section twice over, knows his fairytales. He knows that wishes don’t ever come free.

Hannie dies the year they turn nine, whittled down to cavernous eye sockets and wan skin stretched over her bones, smaller than a woman of her stature should have been able to get. Boyd grows like a weed that year, flushed cheeks and eyes bright as charcoal and flame, the healthiest boy in the congregation as they file solemnly out to his mama’s grave.

(Raylan doesn’t ask again, doesn’t ask his mama what damnation she wove into Boyd’s bones. He doesn’t want to know – Frances dies two years later, just as Raylan is growing into his hands and feet; and Arlo hasn’t touched him for a year and Frances is nothing but exhaustion and splinters by the time she dies, and Raylan _doesn’t want to know_.)

Raylan leaves Harlan at nineteen, stays long enough to regret it — stays long enough to see Boyd fall one more time, skinned hands on either side of Raylan’s head, scrawny shoulders bearing the brunt of a coal slab that should have killed them both — before he sees sense and flees, slams into his truck and heads for the border without telling anyone goodbye.

Raylan runs and the fog sets in. It was a clear night, when they stumbled out of the mine, Raylan holding most of Boyd’s paltry weight, nothing but mistletoe berries and burnt out coal, but by the time he hits the county highway it’s thicker than tar, impossible to see the road, nothing but white in the headlights.

And then they hit on a coal-black patch with no reflection, a silhouette standing unafraid in the middle of the road. (Raylan hits the brakes, but there’s no way the ancient truck could stop in time. He can feel the thud of a metal bumper against flesh. Boyd doesn’t even flinch.)

“You leaving without saying goodbye?” Boyd wonders, climbing into the passenger seat of Raylan’s truck like he belongs, face still dark with soot and shirt torn, leaving coal dust smeared across the seat. _You think you could?_ he doesn’t say, dark eyes glittering, cheeks flushed from the mine collapse, or maybe from the bodies Harlan swallowed when she brought the tunnels down. _You think there’s anywhere in this county you could get away from me?_

Raylan looks away, peers through the window into the blinding white of the fog and thinks he can see the curl of Boyd’s lips, the white of his teeth. He isn’t sure if the reflection’s in the glass, or if it’s swirled into the fog, coal in Boyd’s lifeline and his face scrawled in the Harlan mist.

“Who says I’m leaving?” Raylan retorts, means for it to sound brave, a grown man made cocky by his recent brush with death, death following him with grave dirt eyes and coal dark hair, sitting in the cab of his truck. It echoes in the fog-shrouded truck, sounds plaintive and helpless, the cry of a wounded cub caught in a trap and knowing there’s no escape.

“Ain’t you?” Boyd says, cocks his head and sweeps his skinny arm out to gesture at the road ahead. The fog settled in front of Raylan’s headlights twists with the curve of Boyd’s fingers, curls serpentine over the hood before it suddenly clears, leaves nothing but the black pitch of the road and the hair-prickling darkness of a moonless night, the sea parted to allow a man’s escape.

Raylan stares at the unmarked skin of Boyd’s arm, the dark map etched in lines on Boyd’s palm. “You should be dead,” he says quietly, thinks of seven-year-old Boyd on the monkey bars, eight-year-old Boyd on the school roof, Boyd a few hours past with coal shards in his lungs, curved over Raylan and holding back the mountain with shaking arms. “I should have killed you.” It’s true: saving Raylan _should_ have killed Boyd. Raylan should have left him in that tunnel and run, his mother’s blood in his veins and his family the reason Boyd Crowder’s been set loose on the world.

“You gonna shoot me, Raylan?” Boyd wonders, his smile ricocheting off the glass like a gunshot, echoing like mocking laughter in the remnants of fog. “You think that would do any good?”

Raylan’s daddy bought him his first gun, and Raylan’s kept it loaded with silver bullets since he was sixteen, knows enough to be sure that silver should kill most anything, be it a deer or his daddy or the boy beside him on the seat. He pulls the gun up from under his feet; aims it at Boyd’s hollow chest. He wonders if Boyd will turn to coal-dust and ash, once he’s dead, nothing but twigs and mud and a heart carved out of stone. He wonders if they’d find two corpses in the truck, come morning, or just the one. He lowers the gun.

“Next time, then,” Boyd says, soft words and a cool brush of fingers against Raylan’s clenched hand.

Raylan hits the gas, then, and Boyd vanishes in between one breath and the next, disappears like the fog just as Raylan crosses the county line.

“Ain’t gonna be a next time,” Raylan says, talking to the empty seat beside him. There’s nobody there, now; so it must be the fog settled around Raylan’s head, the mist that echoes like Boyd’s disbelieving laughter in his ears.

**Author's Note:**

> More of the paranormal Harlan idea. Boyd's mother's name in this is for "Hannah," from the Bible. (Kudos if you'd figured that out on your own!) Feel free to ask me questions about the rest of it, it's vague partly by design and partly just through bad writing.


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